Social Marketing

Social Marketing a Rapidly Changing Business

One may ask whether companies who seek a niche in fields held by leaders like Groupon and Facebook can survive or even thrive.

“Foursquare’s competitors, Brightkite, Gowalla, and so on, all those guys are pivoting, but Foursquare is staying the path, they have a long uphill battle. I mean, Facebook Places is just crushing everybody,” Miller said. “But Foursquare, I don’t think they’re toast. I think theyr’e in a pretty great niche market.”

Without a doubt there are many players in these industries, but it isn’t a matter of questioning whether they can carve out a niche, it is a question of how large that niche needs to be for the owner’s of the business to be satisfied and successful.

“Now you’re seeing this explosion in daily deal sites, just like you did in location-based services, continued Miller. “The same thing could happen again. It’ll change more after Google’s Groupon clone takes root, and when Facebook unleashes facebook deals. What does that do to Groupon and LvingSocial? No one knows, but it could all converge. A lot of folks will want to be in this business.”

Coupon Savings

At first Groupon, like any new concept, fought an uphill battle to create and popularize an idea they recognized as innovative. Indeed, since Groupon caught on, daily deal sites have begun springing up everywhere with new players entering the field every day. In December, there were more than 200 daily deal sites in the US alone. Now there are 50 daily deal sites in Vancouver, BC alone.

One has to ask whether CardStar will partner with any of them to create app’s for their daily deal offerings.

“It’s funny, we’re announcing the partnership with Groupon today, but we actually know the guys at LivingSocial better, and we’ve had discussions with them. We’ve also talked to the company that powers AOL’s deal sites and Mobile Spinach,” Miller said.

“At the end of the day, I think we should partner with whoever offers something unique to our users. Among all these daily deals, we’re seeing a lot of overlap,” said Miller. “I’m signed up for 4 cities, and I’m seeing the same content in a lot of them, they seem to all be sourcing the same deals. But as long as a service is providing original content and creating unique utilities for users, we’ll check them out.”
After all, Groupon advertised on the Super Bowl, if it takes more than that to convince you these companies are making a lot of money, what will it take?

“I was getting texts from friends about the Groupon commercials as well as the LivingSocial commercials whenever they happened. They weren’t scandals, though,” Miller said. ‘People were just surprised at seeing them on TV at such a prime, $3 million per minute advertising time. The people who texted me obviously weren’t aware of how much money these companies are making right now.”